


Unintended Consequences

by GenericUsername01



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Accidental Soul Bond, Angel and Demon True Forms (Good Omens), Crowley's Name is Crawly | Crawley (Good Omens), He/Him Pronouns For Aziraphale (Good Omens), Metaphysical Sex, Other, Soul Bond, The Garden of Eden, They/Them Pronouns for Crowley (Good Omens)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-24
Updated: 2020-05-24
Packaged: 2021-03-02 22:22:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,246
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24354274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GenericUsername01/pseuds/GenericUsername01
Summary: “You should come join me,” Crawly cajoled. “Or else I’ll splash you.”“You wouldn’t.”“I would too.”Aziraphale hesitated. He had practically just gotten dry. “You promise the water’s warm?”“I promise.” A hint of sulfur wafted across the air, and Aziraphale figured that was the scent of Crawly’s magic, making good on their word.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 8
Kudos: 108





	Unintended Consequences

**Author's Note:**

> So this was going to be my post for prompt number three of the Good Omens Celebration. And as you can see, I’m posting this on May 24, not May 3, so clearly that just did not happen.

And, well, after the rain had finished falling and Adam and Eve had disappeared beyond the horizon, Aziraphale and Crawly had spent about fourteen hours talking to each other and admitted to extreme reluctance in reporting back to head office.

Aziraphale had been confused about that, at first. “Why wouldn’t you want to go back?” he’d asked. “Surely they’ll be proud of you. Probably have a parade.”

“Nah,” Crawly had said. “’ll probably get a promotion out of it, but I don’t want one. It’ll just paint a target on my back. The last thing I need is a bunch of ambitious upstarts trying to kill me to get ahead. Besides.” They had turned their head lazily to meet Aziraphale’s eyes. “If I get promoted, not only will I be stuck down in Hell most the time, but also I’ll have to manage a whole horde of demons.”

Aziraphale had shuddered.

And so they had continued to stand on the wall and talk to each other until it became too uncomfortable. Crawly had started pacing back and forth under Aziraphale’s wing about six hours in, and had sat huddled in a little ball at hour nine. Aziraphale had been trying to subtly stretch each muscle without shifting his position terribly much. Crawly had asked early on if he wanted to switch so that Crawly was sheltering Aziraphale for a while, but the angel had refused. He didn’t know why, but it felt good to be the one offering safety and comfort to Crawly. He supposed it was some innate angel instinct.

Now, though, Crawly stood and stretched every muscle in their lean body, wings quivering and then giving a few hard flaps. They turned to face into the Garden, and gave Aziraphale a… well, a devilish grin.

“C’mon,” they said. “ If we’re gonna avoid our bosses for the rest of eternity, we may as well do it somewhere more comfortable.”

“Not the rest of _eternity,”_ Aziraphale said, scandalized.

Crawly rolled their eyes. “Figure of speech, angel.”

They tucked their wings back and stepped off the ledge, swooping down in an elegant dive before unfurling their wings to full length. The wind caught underneath them, pulling Crawly out of the dive to soar over the treetops. They pulled their wings back towards the center of the Garden, dipping into the open area where the four rivers diverged.

Aziraphale’s breath had caught in his throat as he watched. Angels rarely flew, since the War, and never on Earth, never with an actual atmosphere and wind and obstacles. Crawly looked as natural here as any other earthly creature, as at home and graceful in the sky as a hawk making razor-point turns around cliffs.

Aziraphale drew his own wings back and leapt off the edge to follow after them.

The Garden of Eden was massive, surrounded by an entire forest containing every seed-bearing plant of the Earth, every tree with seed-bearing fruit, every tree that was pleasing to look at and good for food, and the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Bad. It had walls around it that made that made what was literally the most impressive forest on Earth look puny. Near the center—beside the Trees—was a rocky hill from which an underground spring flowed into a waterfall. There was a beautiful pool underneath which went on to become a river throughout the Garden, and then split off to become four rivers: the Pishon, the Gihon, the Tigris, and the Euphrates.

Aziraphale found Crawly floating in the pool with all their limbs splayed out, basking like the sunning reptile they were even as they got misted on by the waterfall. He made an offended noise, coming to a running stop beside the pool.

“To think, I spent all that time keeping you from getting wet just for you to go and throw all my hard work away.”

“Aww, Aziraphale, you know I love you. But floating is way different than getting rained on. You have to know that.”

“I most certainly do not.”

“Well, for one thing, nobody ever used a _pond_ as a weapon during the War. Also the sun’s out now and this water is warm. And—and it’s like being in space,” Crawly said. Their voice became different at the end. Almost meek.

Coming from a demonic apostate whose soul was _drenched_ in pride, Aziraphale found it unsettling.

“Like space?” he asked. He approached the water line and swirled a toe in, robes lifted up carefully.

“Yeah,” Crawly said. “I was in star construction, you know. Before. Was just a builder most of the time, but I did get to dabble in architecture now and then.”

“The builders were important too,” Aziraphale murmured.

“Right, yeah,” Crawly said. “But I liked designing more.”

Star construction had been what the Virtues were doing, in a pre-human existence. The Virtues were the second of three Choirs in the second of three Spheres—essentially, the dead center, middle of the road rank. For some reason that sat oddly with Aziraphale. He mostly thought of demons as sitting in darkened rooms, rubbing their hands together and scheming, before the War. As if they would have been clearly and fully evil their entire existence. The idea of Crawly doing angelic work in Heaven—of them actually missing it…

Aziraphale had also been told that all the demons were power-hungry, prideful, greedy. The archangels said that the unhappy rebels mostly wanted undue rank and privilege. Lucifer certainly had. Azazel had said that all angels could be like God, which was preposterous, and Samael had genuinely tried to take the position.

It had been insinuated that the problem of rebel angels was limited to ignorant members of the lower ranks, desiring prestige for themselves and being manipulated by a few evildoers from the First Sphere. Samael, a former seraph, had crowned himself King of Hell and the Great Adversary, which seemed to confirm it. The first (only) demon Aziraphale had met had a name he’d never heard of and was covered in the reeking, glowing slime of pride on his soul. It fit.

Except Crawly didn’t want a promotion, and while they had been a construction worker, that wasn’t exactly the bottom of the barrel, job wise. It just… Aziraphale had never expected a demon to be _average._ Normal. Relatable, even.

Not that Crawly was particularly average, actually. Hell didn’t know how lucky they were.

“You should come join me,” Crawly cajoled. “Or else I’ll splash you.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“I would too.”

Aziraphale hesitated. He had practically just gotten dry. “You promise the water’s warm?”

“I promise.” A hint of sulfur wafted across the air, and Aziraphale figured that was the scent of Crawly’s magic, making good on their word.

Or making it suddenly cold as a joke. Aziraphale dipped his foot in one more time to test, but no, the water was quite pleasantly heated now. He gave a delighted little shimmy and girded up his robes for comfort before wading in.

They floated in nearly hot water with a complementarily cool mist from the waterfall for ages. Well, not ages. But long enough for Aziraphale to relax so far that he forgot all about those troubling things like Heaven and a failed assignment and a missing flaming sword. His eyes were closed, the sun and water felt wonderful, Crawly’s spirit nearby was so delightful and reassuring. Aziraphale practically felt like he was melted into the pond.

Until he was very suddenly attacked from underneath and pushed over, sputtering and splashing. Crawly was cackling maniacally as they swam away. Aziraphale gasped and sucked in lungfuls of air.

“You’ll pay for that!”

Crawly was already clambering up the shore, like the cretin and scoundrel they were.

Aziraphale sloshed over to the shore as fast as he could and soon tackled Crawly, giggling, into the grass. The demon squirmed around in order to be pressed face to face with Aziraphale, and met him with blazing eyes that took his breath away.

“Well, you’ve got me,” Crawly said. “Now what are you going to do with me?”

Aziraphale reached up and tickled their neck, causing Crawly to shriek (loudly, right in his ear) and push him away.

“What! What—What was that!?!”

“Tickling?” Aziraphale said. “Oh, I didn’t mean to startle you so badly. I saw Adam and Eve do it with each other, and it looked quite enjoyable. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. Show me how.” Crawly thrust an arm out towards Aziraphale.

“…So you can tickle me?”

“Yeah.” They made a ‘get to it’ gesture.

Aziraphale lifted Crawly’s sleeve off their arm and took their wrist in one hand. “The humans explained it to me,” he said. “It takes a delicate touch, barely there.” He used his other hand to demonstrate, and Crawly squirmed, laughter bursting out of them.

They immediately retaliated, of course. No good deed goes unpunished.

From then on it was war.

Within twenty minutes, Crawly—villainous knave that they were—was advancing on Aziraphale, having trapped him against the cliff wall of the waterfall. Stalking forward like this, eyes preternaturally focused, Aziraphale was keenly aware that of the two of them, Crawly was genuinely a predator. A literal snake in the grass.

Wait. Aziraphale was a cherub.

He shifted into his true form and growled as his paws hit the ground. Crawly jumped back, eyes wide, and Aziraphale wondered if perhaps this hadn’t been the best idea. For all his true form has four heads, it is mostly leonine, and quite a bit larger than an earthly lion too.

As soon as he was about to apologize, Crawly shifted into their own true form, which was a giant, fancy snake. Or, well, a dragon. They did have claws.

The game of chase was _much_ more interesting this way. And, Aziraphale didn’t know if this held true for Crawly as well, but he personally found the demon’s true form to be much more pleasing to look at. That probably was not how an angel should view things. He should find the soul of a demon disgusting. Repulsive.

But he didn’t. Crawly was gorgeous, beautiful, exquisite. Aziraphale knew he paled in comparison, but he could only hope Crawly felt half so much pleasure looking at him.

The chase turned to wrestling, and while Aziraphale did find having proper arms to be an advantage, he was limited by his legs ending in glowing brass hooves and by his four wings being bulky enough to get in the way, whereas Crawly—despite their own wings in this form—still managed to be frustratingly serpentine. They wound around him in a veritable knot, twisting and slithering and never holding still. If Aziraphale couldn’t actively see the fangs in their mouth, he’d think Crawly was a constrictor rather than venomous.

He finally managed to swing an arm around Crawly’s neck and his eagle’s head crowed with victory, despite still being thoroughly entangled by the dragon.

Then something happened.

They were no longer on the physical plane. Which was all well and good, but that meant that now their very souls were touching, and there was no longer any sort of barrier between them, nothing to prevent their spirits from sinking into one another.

It wasn’t intentional so much as it just _happened,_ and neither of them exactly did anything to prevent it. Their souls blended into one another, each burrowing further and further into the other, mixing until there was no distinction, no single part of them that was just ‘Crawly’ or just ‘Aziraphale.’

It was divine, unholy ecstasy. It was the full immersion of one soul into another. And oh, Aziraphale thought Crawly’s soul was so beautiful, so striking and lovely. He could sense everything about them— visions of the past, of Heaven, of Hell. He could sense Crawly’s emotions and thoughts as they occurred. Aziraphale felt the very essence of who they were, Crawly’s nature and all the intimate parts of their soul, and saw that it was good.

He would have been knocked breathless, were it possible in this plane.

He was simultaneously aware of the reverse happening. His own life up to this point was flirting by as if experienced anew, and Crawly watched, _felt_ it with rapt attention. Aziraphale sensed a burgeoning feeling of love from them, and nearly disintegrated on the spot.

Amazingly, he recognized that feeling, having found it in his own self just seconds ago. Or minutes, or hours, however long they had been here.

Their blending became deliberate. Less fumbling and more of a dance. They sank into each other, exploring every part and aspect, emotions high and all in flavors of joy. It was divine. It was exquisite.

At some point, they came down from their peak and settled back into the physical plane, into human corporations. They were both panting and clutching at each other on the ground, bodies burning hot with souls that were still on fire and knew it.

Crawly was grinning, light and love shining in their eyes

Aziraphale giggled and tucked his face into their neck. _Oh, I want to stay with you forever._

He felt a further burst of happiness and longing from Crawly. _If only we could._

Just like that, their joyful playfulness came to a stop. They both pulled back and looked at each other.

_Can you hear me?_ Asked Crawly’s voice, in Aziraphale’s head.

_Fuck,_ Aziraphale thought.


End file.
